What UX designers are concerned about is how to offer a customer-satisfied product or service. Nowadays, not every designer cannot succeed in doing this and that is why there are so many similar products on the market and it is difficult for them to stand out.

The most effective way to have one innovative idea and develop what users are willing to pay for is to follow the UX design thinking process. The core point of the agile UX design thinking process is that you should stand at the side of users to understand what they need and what problems they have instead of your side. Then, you can find a corresponding solution. With the method you get, you can innovate what users want.

For better understanding, we will show you what design thinking and the 5 UX design thinking processes are here.

What is Design Thinking?

Design thinking is a process to generate design ideas and a way to fix a problem. The first time that it appeared can be traced back to the book The Sciences of the Artificial appeared in the year 1969 and then, Stanford University spread it all over the world. Differing from the normal process where you will consider how to make a great product for your company and get more profit, design thinking puts customers first and what you need to think about is what problems customers have and how to help them out.

Why is Design Thinking So Important?

There are a lot of reasons that make Design thinking popular, important, and helpful. Here are the major ones:

Inspire creativity: Creativity is the most fundamental element that pushes the development of projects, products, or companies. However, it is not a simple task to have one creative idea. The process of design thinking is a way to reveal and collect creative solutions from your teams and a way to get inspiration from customers.

Satisfying solutions: Design thinking takes the customer first and all solutions will be verified with customers. It can make sure the methods you offer are satisfying.

Define the problem: There may be problems that are not possible to define only with customers’ descriptions if you are not in the actual scenarios of using the products. Upon design thinking, you are allowed to follow what customers think and observe how they operate. It will be much easier for you to figure out what and how they met the problem.

Widely used: Design thinking is not only for design. It can also be brought into play in other industries such as business, education, science, or any other field.

Easy to follow: There is no skill required to start design thinking. The only thing you need to know is what the process is and how to take everything into control.

Improve efficiency: Vary from other ways, design thinking will verify whether the thought, idea, or solution proposed meets users’ requirements. You do not have to create a real product to test and only use one prototype with interactive actions, then it can be checked by your customers directly. It will save a lot of time, as the prototype can be updated easily. Once all is confirmed by customers, we can produce the products.

The Ultimate UX Design Thinking Process In 2022

The 5 UX design thinking processes are well-known and are extensively used. To understand your users, define the problems, find the solutions, make the solutions come true, then, test, feedback and update is the process you can follow to get the creative product.

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Step One. Empathize — Understand Your Users

Empathy comes first in design thinking steps, which means that you should have the same sense of customers and think things in their way and on their side. So, the first thing you should do is to put yourself in the place of customers.

There are various ways to know what customers are thinking about, what problems they have, and what they need. Observing, listening, interviewing, and conducting a survey are frequently used methods.

Take a prototype app as an example. When it plans to have an update to get more likes from customers, it will do research and compare its app with the competitors. In this case, it can only get the tool more like competitors instead of making it more competitive.

What it should do is listen to customers’ feedback and take a questionnaire about what features they want. Then, it can know how users use this tool, what they expect this app can do for them, what they think about it, what problems the existing app has, and in what cases it cannot meet users ‘ needs.

Step Two: Define — Find Out The Problems Your Users Have

After collecting thoughts, feedback, and problems from users, you need to define the true worries or difficulties users have according to analyzing. At this stage, you should not only take the goal of your company and the difficulty you will meet into consideration but also care about the user’s actions, thoughts, and requirements.

You can figure out the core concerns and requirements by thinking about what users said, what they did, what they thought, and what they felt.

Step Three: Ideate — Figure Out Effective Solutions

Once you define these pain points, you should start to catch sight of solutions. The most used method in this design thinking process UX to get an effective resolution is brainstorming. You can book a meeting, have a fixed subject for this brainstorming, and make sure everyone is comfortable and free to express their ideas.

For instance, when product managers or UI designers use Mockplus, they want to add interaction as easily as they want. The team can look at how users add interaction and how we can add it with simple clicks, etc.

After collecting all ideas, you can let everyone vote for each thought, then, choose the top ones to try.

Step Four: Prototype — Turn Ideas Into True Solutions

For UX designers, at this step, you can create one prototype to turn the ideas picked up before into true solutions. We recommend you to have a low fidelity prototype instead of high fidelity to save time and improve your working efficiency.

To create a prototype, you need to use a third-party tool and Mockplus is one of these tools you can use. You can design a prototype, get feedback from your team, update it, then send it to your users to test with Mockplus. By the way, Mockplus works not only at this step but can also at all stages of design thinking.

Step Five: Test — Try Your Solution

Now you have got the solution ready, you need to try the prototype on your own and send it to your users to check whether it is what they need. Then, you can return back to the steps above to redefine the problem and update the fix. You need to make sure that it is the actual scene to use the tool for users and do not give any tips or interpretations during the experiment.

The Take-Away

The UX design thinking process can help designers understand why customers perform as they did and create a UX design with a better experience. You can follow this ultimate guide to learn what users want and provide the solution users need. Then, you can create the product users need.